Why do we need Janusz Korczak now?

No, Henryk Goldschmidt, known to the whole world as Janusz Korczak, was not an idealist carp. He was a rather tough man, a military doctor who had gone through three wars. The book “How to love a child” was not written in the quiet of an office and not in a boarding school, where children lovingly stuck around him.

Surprisingly, he sketched out the book How to Love a Child in short moments of respite between surgical operations to the groans of the wounded and the explosions of shells in the front line. Found time and place for pedagogical creativity.

The first war in his life was the Russo-Japanese. It was conceived as a small victorious one, but turned into the beginning of the collapse of the empire. Korczak gained his second front-line experience during the First World War, where doctors were amazed at the impotence and moral decay of the tsarist medical service.

In 1915 he was 35 years old! By this time, he was already a fairly well-known writer and teacher. The writer’s tenacity of the eye and literary gift only helped to find polished formulations. J. Korchak urged both parents and teachers to daily written recording of observations of children, explaining to the latter that “otherwise their life will be wasted in vain.”

Strikingly, Korczak, however, like Makarenko, never wrote strictly scientific works. However, hundreds if not thousands of dissertations are defended on their books.

His pedagogical thought was cast not only in literary form. J. Korchak had a rare gift for materializing pedagogical ideas, because he was, as they would say today, a brilliant manager of education, able to clearly organize the work of a children’s institution with an incredibly complex contingent of pupils in a short time.

He was a pedagogical realist and was aware that the school was not on the moon and that his pupils would have to live in the real world. And “the world is ugly and people are sad,” as the great American poet Wallace Stevens said. It does not follow from this that it is useless to teach children the truth and instill in them eternal moral values. But there is one but: “How can love for the truth do without knowledge of the roads along which falsehood travels? Do you want sobering to come suddenly, when life itself smears our ideals with its fist? Will not your pupil immediately stop believing in all your truths when he sees your first lie? If life requires fangs, do we have the right to arm children with one blush of shame and quiet sighs? Your duty is to bring up children, not sheep, workers, not preachers: in a healthy body – a healthy mind. A healthy spirit is not sentimental and does not like to be a victim. I want hypocrisy to accuse me of immorality!” A cheeky phrase.

The hypocrisy of adults is the curse of education in all ages.

Self-satisfied adults, for the most part demonstrating a faulty way of life, preach to children an ideal way of existence, not allowing the idea that growing children feel and painfully endure falsity with their skin: the distance between word and deed. But there are times when this gap is wide. It is the hypocrisy of state-owned ideologists that dictates the state upbringing strategy, based solely on positive examples, designed to instill in children a love for their native ashes. And about the ways of falsehood – not a word. And this is in conditions of free access to any information on the Internet.

It is hypocrisy that accuses of immorality, lack of patriotism and other mortal sins those educators who risk discussing with their pupils “the sins of our eternal homeland” (B. Okudzhava).

It is hypocrisy that leads to the fact that the student, once suddenly convicting the teacher of deceit, ceases to believe in all his truths. And as a result, he becomes a cynic or a spontaneous rebel, whose protest spills onto the streets.

Korczak’s cocky desire to be accused of immorality by hypocrisy is coming true before our very eyes. The Old Doctor laughed openly, looking at hypocrisy, capable of expressing only righteous anger and nothing more.

For all that, he was not a dissident and for the sake of the children was ready to play different games with the powers that be, knowing full well that the authorities would always be suspicious of independent-minded people.

He fearlessly made compromises, not looking back at the opinions of principled (at someone else’s expense) armchair politicians. (In modern jargon, they are called Facebook hamsters.)

So, after the May 1926 coup by J. Pilsudski, who was not bloodless, Korczak took advantage of the sympathy for his literary work on the part of the dictator’s wife. She gave sponsorship funds for the maintenance of two orphanages.

He carefully observed politics, believed that children should know how the state works, but at the same time he stubbornly put into practice a closed model of a children’s institution, creating a home for his pupils in which moral and mental well-being reigns. A concept vulnerable from all sides. It was easy to reproach him (and was reproached) for utopianism and inconsistency. This, in my opinion, imaginary contradiction makes sense to understand. Yes, he believed that children should be prepared for life, without hiding from them the harsh unsightly sides. But it is one thing to prepare for life, and quite another to throw them into this raging ocean without first learning how to swim. Korczak believed that the collision with the world should come only when the children were strong. And at the stage of growing up, he did everything possible to preserve their physical and mental health, and most importantly, instilled in children a sense of self-worth and thereby strengthened their own dignity. The entire way of life of the orphanage was subordinated to these goals.

In relation to children, the Doctor took the only true protective position. This position is especially close to teachers who educate children in critical eras.

A revolutionary in pedagogy, he nevertheless always warned, speaking at workers’ meetings: “You cannot make a revolution without thinking about the child.” In one of his letters, he remarks: “It is easiest to die for an idea. Such a beautiful film: falling with a shot through the chest – a trickle of blood on the sand – and a grave buried in flowers. The hardest thing is to live from day to day, from year to year for the sake of an idea. As he wrote, he lived, believing that it is possible to truly transform the world only by transforming education.

A separate hot issue is the formation of religious, national and cultural identity. Korczak spent his whole life creating pedagogy in Poland, torn apart by internal contradictions, the social atmosphere of which was not calm and benevolent, but saturated with fears and prejudices.

Everyone attacked him. Orthodox Jews – for the fact that he Polonizes children. Poles and assimilated Jews – for unnecessarily instilling in pupils a sense of Jewish identity, making it difficult for them to integrate into Polish society. Zionists – for not persuading children to go to Palestine. Communists – for not calling them to fight capitalism. “Which lantern will you hang me on when you make your revolution?” he asked one of his former pupils.

Korczak was far from a narrow confessional approach, but at the same time he recognized the right of every child to choose his own path to God in accordance with his family traditions. Hence his notes “Alone with the Lord God,” subtitled “The Prayers of Those Who Don’t Pray.”

“The land, the church, the fatherland, virtue and sin can be dogma; there can be science, social and political work, wealth, struggle, and also God as a hero, a god or a puppet. Not in what, but how you believe.

The latter is the most important for the teacher. Korczak continues: “I believe the roots of many unpleasant surprises lie in the fact that one is given the ten commandments carved in stone when he wants to burn them himself with the heat of his heart in his chest, while the other is forced to seek truths that he must receive ready. You can’t see this if you approach the child not with “I will make a man out of you”, but with an inquisitive “what kind of person can you be?”

From the position of the orthodox, of which there are many among the neophytes of recent years, such an approach is unacceptable. In search of freedom, Korczak, to use his own expression, “did not lose God in the crush.” He was equally alien to the philistine exaggerated concept of human power, and the imperious sayings of servants, mediators, interpreters: “Come to me, for only my God is real.” The doctor understood too well that “there are different truths: yours, mine, his. Our truths are not the same yesterday and today. And tomorrow both yours and my truth will be different.”

That is why the eschatological forebodings with which his books are filled never killed Korczak’s cheerfulness and good spirits. You cannot bend the personality of a teacher of such a magnitude to the ground, but you cannot tear it away from it either. The intersection of earth and sky, as you know, opens the horizon line in any activity, including our pedagogical field.

The life, fate and books of Korczak, and first of all the book “How to love a child”, are constantly pushing for allusions, parallels with modernity. Which is quite natural, because this book is eternal. It will never lose its relevance. Reading and re-reading it for many years, giving it to young teachers, I never tire of being amazed at the author’s wisdom and pedagogical insight.